{"id":7737,"date":"2019-01-29T07:56:56","date_gmt":"2019-01-29T12:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7737"},"modified":"2022-04-17T11:38:37","modified_gmt":"2022-04-17T15:38:37","slug":"chrome-and-steel-poetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7737","title":{"rendered":"Chrome and Steel Poetics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Ford<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Last Saturday was Michigan Statehood Day, and to answer the\nkind of question my young daughter would ask, no, I was not around for those\nfestivities back in 1837. A few days before the anniversary, I learned\nsomething new about my home state that is another cause for celebration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emily Temple at lithub<\/em>\ncompiled a state-by-state\nlist of winners<\/a> of America\u2019s three major literary awards: the Pulitzer\nPrize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Michigan,\ntenth in total population, ranked seventh in the list with 15 of these top\nprizes. New York was first, of course with 71, followed by California (29),\nIllinois (28), Pennsylvania (24), Massachusetts (20), and New Jersey (17), a\nfunction of population size and the location of the country\u2019s cultural\nepicenters. New Jersey slips in by grasping the coattails of Manhattan and\nPhiladelphia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Detroit\u2019s population peaked at 1.85 million in 1950, the\nyear Detroit native Nelson Algren won the National Book Award for The Man\nwith the Golden Arm<\/em>. After that, the city\u2019s population numbers went into a\nprecipitous decline, coming to rest at 673,000 in 2017. Though the city\u2019s\nprospects appear to be looking up lately, its downward economic spiral had\nstatewide effects. Yet a dozen of the state\u2019s literary awards occurred in the\npost-apogee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We Michiganders can thank the poets for keeping our state in\nthe award limelight, up to and including Jess Tyehimba, who won the 2017\nPulitzer for Olio<\/em>. Poet Philip Levine\nis responsible for four of the awards, two for the same book, Ashes<\/em>, and poet Theodore Roethke for\nthree. Levine worked in the auto factories from the time he was 14 and was\ncommitted to giving a voice to the anonymous workers there\u2014a Diego Rivera<\/a> of words. Not all\nthe poets are Detroiters, of course. Roethke\u2019s work hearkened back to his\nchildhood among Saginaw\u2019s fruit orchards.\n\nOne of my favorite poets, Marge Piercy, titled\none of her poetry collections Made in\nDetroit<\/em>, and a scrap of paper with an excerpt of  her \u201cIn praise of joe<\/a>\u201d\nflutters next to my computer (and coffee cup). She\u2019s not on the list of\nprizewinners, but she auto be.\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

photo, top, the Ford Rouge plant, Wikimedia, creative commons license<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n


<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Saturday was Michigan Statehood Day, and to answer the kind of question my young daughter would ask, no, I was not around for those festivities back in 1837. A few days before the anniversary, I learned something new about … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Chrome and Steel Poetics - how does your state rank among those whose writers have received literary awards? My home state of Michigan was 7th! (Quick, name two Michigan authors!)","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,682,513,104],"tags":[1334,414],"class_list":["post-7737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-fine-arts","category-poetry","category-the-morgue","tag-michigan","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-20N","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7737"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7738,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7737\/revisions\/7738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}